This^^^^

(though to be honest, Android has a lot of BeOS concepts in it because the same engineers ended up working on it too. It has Binder, and Intents are basically BMessages - there are all the Loopers, Handlers and Receivers too...)

Given the famous keynote where he announced killing OpenDoc and other efforts, I am not so sure about that, regarding scrapping the hybrid BeOS platform.

Nope. I run it under QEMU since even the nightlies don't support Ryzen power states.

My guess - BeOS and Haiku are not Linux based systems (not BSB, nor any other OS.) People that use Haiku probably do so out of choice and I guess they already know Linux exists. If they wanted to use Linux, they probably would. IMO, stating "just use Linux" therefore seems super obnoxious.

Perhaps one reason is that it seems off topic and you treated "snappy" as a proper noun

Its not that easy. Win32 API is not static, in evolves. While yes, it can provide great backward compat, new stuff is introduced ever new OS release (or Win10 update), so its pretty much easy to destroy portability to older version. To keep portability, you must target lowest API version you want, and keep it using like this.

Why not Linux and play diablo 2 with wine? Last time I tried it worked great.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing :) I have that for Windows 95 and 98. During the XP era I was mostly using Linux, though I did use xp for gaming every now and then.

IOKit dates to circa 1999; it’s not “modern C++” by any reasonable definition.

IE already had debugging tools, however they had to be installed either via Visual Studio or Office Developer Tools.

It flat-out made training people on CSS tolerable. I could have them install the Bookmarklet (before it became an Extension), show them how to use it, and boom, instant productivity boost. Being able to dig through the DOM and figure out what element was applying excessive margin or padding reduced 80% of my "heeeelp!" requests.

Within months I couldn't imagine working without it.

Thanks for that history. I was under the impression it was an Android, Inc. invention, but that it came from BeOS is blowing my mind.

And we never really got any of them working, so I would contest that. Many years ago, I asked about Pi 2 support on the Haiku forums and there was a lot of ill will towards Broadcom closed binaries. I pointed at the Plan9 port and a couple more examples and nothing happened.

I tried the same thing several times with the Pi 3 and the Pi 4, and someone more vocally pointed towards RISC-V. Some four years later, there is a somewhat working RISC-V port, but in the meantime there is still no working ARM port of any real use.

On the whole, I was not overly impressed with the Haiku OS community where it regards exploring widely popular platforms that, despite having some challenges, would provide them with a larger audience. It's their call, but as an original BeOS user (and who can actually spot the Be Book from my couch as I'm typing this) and someone who's spent the past two years delving into the Rockchip ecosystem, I'm quite saddened by the way things went. It's not as if they lacked other ARM options, they just a) didn't have the resources and b) were perhaps a tad too opinionated.

According to Mozilla's own numbers, Firefox Monthly Active Users have been trending down for years and are currently sitting at around 155 million.

Source: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Is it though? I think there's scope to improve the laws around intellectual property, but I feel like it's a stretch to suggest that the lack of BeOS source code "harms development".

Are you one of them? I am curious what the experience is like trying to use it as anything like a daily system.

Window Maker still exists. There's an ongoing Wayland port / reimagining: https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker.

> The thing i miss most from that time is Window Maker.

I use WindowMaker as a daily driver. Still.

That sounds more like licensing issues than "being 20 years in the past."

"Promising OS dies after assets are acquired and put in a closet" is still one of the best arguments in favor of Open Source.

While I agree that Win2k was good, I don't think it was quite that popular; The computers you could normally get were still Win98/Me until WinXP. The only way you'd have gotten Win2k pre-installed was either getting a workstation-class machine or unlicensed machines.

I was kind of there. I ran BeOS for a while for fun some years after it had died, in between moving from Macs (which I grew up on in the 90's) to BSD and then Linux.

My point was basically what you're saying: BeOS was not nearly where Windows was, but it was miles and miles ahead of Linux, and it provided a unified graphical OS instead of the fragmented Linux base with all its duplicated efforts. Now, it's hard to say whether we the cascade of attention-deficit teenagers would have united behind an MIT/GPL BeOS and succeeded in producing something actually usable by people who were interested in doing more with their computers than setting up Conky and Fluxbox to post screenshots online, but I think the landscape might have looked different if it'd been an option. BeOS when I used it in 2005 or so was already curiosity, an antique, but if you take all the people who were working on Haiku (which started as OpenBeOS around the end of Be, Inc.), and throw in a handful of the people who were working on KDE and XFCE, starting from everything BeOS could do in 2001, instead of Linux and raw X, what do you have in 2005-6 when Ubuntu started picking up steam?

Yes, it is still single-user. Have you considered a BIOS or bootloader password?

No.

Phoenix Technologies, the BIOS maker sent me an email telling us they made a BIOS web browser and our name would confuse things. Under advice from our legal support, we agreed to change the name.

We changed to Firebird and the OSS database project bombed my inbox (and Mitchell's too) for a week with hundreds of nastygrams and though we were in the clear on TM, we didn't want to stomp on the little OSS project so we changed again.

I was at the whiteboard when Jason Kersey of mozBin, mozillaZine, and later Chrome fame came up with Firefox. We had two columns of names, forces of nature and animals and were pairing them up.

Both Phoenix and Firebird were over the naming and trademark clashes:

For firebird, https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/mozilla-holds-fire-i... and https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/mozillas-fir... in this case it was AOL Time Warner that owned the Firebird trademark for the database.

2) For Phoenix, https://web.archive.org/web/20070914035447/http://www.ibphoe... the main reporting on it seems to be lost but wikipedia still backs it up

The original NeXTcube was 4-bit grayscale, but there was a graphics card available which supported 24-bit colour. The later NeXTstations supported 12-bit colours without any additional hardware.

Tornadocalf

Sadly I now see sites refusing to work unless you use Chrome even though there is no technical reason whatsoever why it should break under other standards-complaint browsers. I've seen all sort of tricks to detect non-Chrome-usage and the result is anything from a snarky message advising you to use Chrome (sometimes a very specific version and OS is specified as well!) at best or a blank page at worst. And yes every time I've seen this, it's happened on public facing sites -- I'm lucky that at $WORKPLACE we are a Microsoft shop, and Microsoft (ironically) seems to put some effort into ensuring their tools works across all the 3 major browser engines (with the possible exception of Teams but I reluctantly use the Electron app for that). Chrome has become the modern day IE. The mainstream population just haven't realized that yet to be fair, but this will become clear in the years to come and the next generation will wonder how the heck both IE and later Chrome become dominant.

As someone doing Web development during 1999 - 2002, on a dotcom startup, there were enough people using Mozzilla browsers.

Well, that hegemony happened by the end of the Netscape days, which prompted the infamous United States v. Microsoft Corp. case.

There were some sites requiring IE6 but not that many, and the improvements like tabs were enough for people switch to Firefox where they could.

Unfortunately Mozilla’s refusal to implement process-per-tab, combined with Flash’s instability, let Chrome eat their lunch.

Yeah, a lot of people switched for its performance. For a while, it was the bringing you the efforts of both Apple and Google to improve the rendering. Couldn't be beat.

I cannot remember a moment when Konqueror felt good enough for me as a daily driver, but it was impressive anyways.

From a community perspective, it would have been a great thing to push it forward further, spend resources on it, and have at least one web browser that isn't somewhat wicked.

Admittedly, back then, we all hoped that Firefox would be that 'friendly' browser, and it probably truly was at that time.

Time has changed. Now I'm forced to like a browser that is always just slightly less evil than a one that would even IE look friendly. And with every version we are now waiting when they also will drop the manifest v2 support for dubious reasons. And even if that will never happen, they will continue to find other ways to disappoint me.

Yes, khtml was at least a nice time to remember. :)

PS: My personal feeling is that "impressive but not good enough as a daily driver" was and is true for some more KDE apps. This is why I use Plasma Desktop, but barely any more of their apps than Dolphin and maybe kate to some degree. I know all you're going to say now about free software and how it works and so on, and you're right, but technically, it would be sooo much better if just half of the email client projects (or office suites, IDEs, photo editing, ...; you name it) would exist, but with more developer powers behind it. But I'm digressing......

Hey, me too, back in the day. Konqueror's ui was much nicer than the alternatives. Especially the ability to open multiple panes in the same window - made browsing slashdot easier.

Shame it hasn't kept up.

We had bloated UIs in the 80s and 90s, it's just that what's come after is so much worse.

Try using the old analog control systems where responses are basically instant. It feels like the controls are reading your mind.

Not only slower, right? I mean, for UIs, there is the same race to the bottom going on as in other parts of the industry.

It needs to be a big show, and everybody must be able to directly understand it without any learning curve or even rtfm.

Everything else (ergonomics, features, ...) are too often secondary values.

I wouldn't say that UIs were great in the 90s. They weren't. It was also harder to implement them. The programming languages were more tedious, low-level, etc.

But as so often, it's disappointing what we do with our additional power today. Snappiness wouldn't even be my first concern, though.

I don't remember Windows 95 & MS Word 6 being especially snappy. I think this is nostalgia.

That's just comparing CRT screens with 60Hz LCD panels. Get anything 120Hz+ and you will see that modern systems are very snappy.

That makes a lot of sense, and I agree. Perhaps a good baseline to develop against today to produce a similar result on modern hardware would be something like a Core 2 Duo or Core i5-750 and Geforce 9600 GT.

Most desktop have such options, kde and gnome too.for instance.

I am pretty sure this is good old resistance to change. You would disabled them on all your systems, then force yourself to use them that way for a month and I am pretty sure that "disorientation" would quickly disappear.

The second article has videos of more comparisons with different software on a greater variety of hardware:

https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html

The point is that the good old days aren't just pure nostalgia, some parts were genuinely good compared to modern bloated software.

If history does repeat itself, the punishment wont be very large, despite guilty judgment. Microsoft was found to have engaged in monopolistic practices, but was still given a relative slap on the wrist instead of outright broken up.

Well, it would appear that Google will be forced to stop paying companies to make Google the default search. This is actually kind of a death for Mozilla as that’s where most of their money comes from.

Microsoft did not get severely punished for bundling the IE.

Google was force feeding Chrome to everyone at google.com.

> Also, it’s pointless to open a menu in less time than it takes the screen to refresh.

No, that would be the goal.

wobbly windows - did you know that they're still available in modern KDE Plasma Desktop Environment? No need to actually miss them! :)

https://userbase.kde.org/Tips/Enable_fun_desktop_effects_on_...